Elysia, Valley of the Nude (1933) reviewed
Brett Marcus Cook examines the propagandistic early nudist film
Elysia, Valley of the Nude (1933)
Directed by Carl HarbaughStarring Constance Allen and James Mack
After recently reviewing Unashamed: A Romance, I was thinking of what other films I could review and how to approach them from a historical standpoint. Elysia, Valley of the Nude is the first proper nudist camp film shot in the United States, beaten only by Michael Mindlin and Jan Gay’s 1932 globe-trotting documentary This Naked Age as far as I can tell. Many nudist film tropes from the 1950’s and 1960’s see their origins here with its meager plot: textile reporter James Mack is given a job by his editor to find a nudist camp and report back on his findings. After visiting a man named Dr. King, Mack is taken by King’s young blonde assistant Prudence Kent to Elysia, a camp run by Hobart Glassey, who helped produce the film and appears as himself.
The film was produced by Bryan Foy, who approached Glassey about making the film to educate the public on the benefits of nudism and to improve the camp’s membership numbers. It succeeded, especially at the latter, but it did so in some unsavory ways.
It’s no secret that nudist films are almost entirely white, especially pre-integration, but Elysia manages to be outright racist in a way that’s somewhat surprising. Upon their meeting, Dr. King gives a cliff notes version of nudist history, citing the ancient Greeks and Benjamin Franklin, before showing Mack documentary footage of Africans and Asian Pacific islanders. While this footage plays for several minutes, Dr. King talks about the health benefits of outdoor nudity, all while referring to the people seen here as primitive and savage. He states outright that any white man who focuses on their body AND mind would be able to overcome them. It’s truly the most offensive and exploitative thing I think I’ve seen in any of these films.
Once that’s over, Ms. Kent takes Mack to the camp, where an awkward, lengthy sermon is given to the clothed residents by campfire. A big part of the nudist movement has always been explaining the health benefits, specifically citing heliotherapy back in the 1920’s and 30’s: how exposing one’s nude body to sunlight can help battle all manners of illness. But here in Elysia, it’s touted as a true cure-all that can conquer anything, so frequently stated and in such a preachy manner that it starts to really feel like quackery from a snake oil salesman. It also feels a little ableist here in 2023, as the movie seems to suggest that nudism is ONLY for healthy, able bodied men and women despite all the talk about the sun’s powers.
From hereon in the movie is business as usual: Mack wanders the grounds with Dr. King the next day, watching people participate in various sports and activities. These scenes aren’t as frustrating as everything preceding them, aside from a few more off-color remarks from Dr. King. You get to see people of different ages, shapes, and sizes hang out together, including families with small children, several people with very cute dogs, and briefly, two women sharing a cigarette before walking off together with their arms around each other (a shot for which there can be no heterosexual explanation). It’s known that Constance Allen was brought into production due to her experience as a nude art model, and while I’ve read that the others who appear in the movie are all actors and models as well, there’s just enough diversity on display that that doesn’t seem to be the case in the way that films of later decades would recruit Playboy models.
Dr. King continues to explain nudism to Mack as they explore the camp, but Mack doesn’t seem to be listening as much as a professional reporter should: he frequently asks where Ms. Kent is after the doctor finishes talking. Ms. Kent always pops up after that, either climbing up some rocks, playing baseball, or throwing water on Mack. It’s clear he’s more in love with her than anything Dr. King is expressing, and Constance Allen is clearly in this movie to serve more as eye candy than anything else. You’d think the film would end with the two of them together, but it’s a little uncertain: while she was the one who brought him initially, and someone is certainly driving Mack off at the end of the film, the final shot is of Ms. Kent waving at the camera, likely a shot reused from earlier in the film.
There’s not a lot of attention paid to shot composition in this movie: while there’s still certainly an attempt being made and you won’t see anyone’s genitals, the filmmakers were a little more lax about trying to obscure pubic hair. It could be in part because while the rules of the Hays code in Hollywood were introduced in 1930, they didn’t go into effect until 1934. Elysia being independently produced and distributed was probably also a factor. As for music, you get some at the very beginning while you read the credits and an opening statement, and then a little more at the end of the movie, that’s all. As for the camp itself, Elysia was moved to a bigger, better space in 1934. Eventually, after some finance-related fighting, Glassey and his wife left and former business partner Peter McConville took over, renaming the park Olympic Fields and allowing Unashamed: A Romance to be shot there. Flo Nilson took over as McConville’s health declined, before finally closing the camp in 2007 under the name Mystic Oaks.
Elysia is certainly an important nudist film, historically speaking, giving us insight into what camps were like in those early days of the movement in America. However, it’s hard to recommend when so much of its short runtime is dedicated to repeated sermons and that early racist segment.
The movie is officially available through Kino Classics and Something Weird on their bluray release of Unashamed: A Romance, and it is interesting to compare and contrast the two as the only nudist features from the 1930’s besides the aforementioned This Naked Age. 🪐
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Brett, you've definitely got Elysia's number. You've described the film I saw. I prefer it to Unashamed, because it's coherently nudist, exploitive maybe, definitely racist, but informed and believable. It is a product of its time, one when filmmakers were preposterously coy about genital nudity, and when you should expect any educated white Protestant to have been a eugenicist. (The Unashamed filmmakers seem to have had an anti-racist agenda, which is remarkable and laudable, but I wish I'd had the chance to give the screenwriters notes. Unashamed gets tedious, and the ending is incredibly grim for a movie that ostensibly wants to promote frolicking naked in the sun.) Elysia's like Thomas Jefferson. He used a slave as a sexual convenience, but wrote a seminal essay about American Independence.